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The Pareto Principle – How it Improves Your Time Management Skills
Ever heard of the 80/20 rule and the Pareto Principle? It is a popular productivity concept. Italian economist and sociologist, Vilfredo Federico Pareto, formulated the eponymous principle. The principle explains an uneven distribution of cause and effect we find in many facets of life.
The main idea of the Pareto principle is that in almost any situation, 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results. Many time management experts say that applying lessons from the Pareto principle can make us better time managers. This article explores how you can use the Pareto principle to increase productivity.
Understanding the Pareto principle
In 1897, Pareto observed that 20% of the population owned 80% of land in Italy and a host of other countries. That observation made Pareto conclude that the uneven distribution could be present in all other economic activities. Pareto’s principle is also called the theory of predictable imbalance.
It has been applied to almost every aspect of human life. To explain the premise of the principle more clearly, we could say that 80% of business sales come from only 20% of your clients. Another example is 80% of the decisions in meetings only take 20% of the entire meeting time to reach.
In other words, most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of factors. This principle can be applied to many areas of life, including time management.
Time management is often about being productive and efficient with the time that you have. The Pareto Principle can be a helpful tool in this area. If you can identify the 20% of activities that are responsible for 80% of your results, you can focus your efforts on those activities and get more done in less time.
Of course, this is not always easy to do. But even if you can only approximate the 20/80 split, you will likely see some improvement in your productivity.
Applying the Pareto Principle to Time Management
With Pareto’s principle, we can understand that just about 20% of whatever effort we put in actually produces the most results. A person who puts in 6 hours of accumulated deep work in an 8-hour workday on a 4-day work week will be more productive than a person who is only able to put in 2 hours of deep work per day in a 5-day work week.
You can observe in the scenario painted above, how the principle relates to productivity and time management. Below are some time management guidelines that stem from understanding how Pareto’s principle works. The guidelines are common across time management writings, even on our own articles. However, if you keep in mind the Pareto Principle when reading them, they take on a more focused intent.
Pareto Principle and Prioritizing
If you took a few days to monitor and record how much time you spend on each task on your schedule. You would find that those small and important tasks tend to take up 80% of the time you allocate for work. They give you a feeling of progress and have a way of distracting you from the more important tasks. Understanding the Pareto principle encourages you to prioritize the important tasks.
If you were aware that only 20% of the work you put in would make a difference wouldn’t you prefer to focus your energy on that 20%? If your accounting and tax management tasks are what make you very valuable, prioritize those above any other. How do you identify the 20% though? They are usually the hardest and most important tasks of your day. Do those with a higher percent of your energy and time.
Pareto Principle and Outsourcing and Delegation
The quality of the effort you put in affects the quality of results you get. Now trying to get enough work into your many obligations so that your 20% translates into tangible results can get tiring or go wrong. That’s because you may waste valuable time doing a mediocre job of handling everything by yourself. Because you lack the expertise or don’t have enough time to put in the quality effort.
What you should do is outsource or delegate tasks to other people. You can hire a housekeeper, a personal assistant, a professional contractor or even an organization. They will take some tasks off your hands and then you are free to focus your energy on your core areas.
Pareto Principle and Distractions
You are surrounded by distractions that stop you from making optimal use of your time. One way to deal with distractions is to make a record of all distractions you experience for a week or so. According to an interpretation of Pareto’s principle, the distractors that make it to the top 20% are responsible for 80% of time wasted via distractions.
Once you have identified these top distractors, get rid of them. Not that you have to throw away your phone or friends. But you can block calls and apps while you work. You could also inform persons who regularly distract you to give you some time to work or rest.
Pareto Principle and Purging Your To-Do List
Out of 100% effort that you put into your work each day, only about 20% will bring you closer to your goals. Now imagine that out of 100% of your time and energy, you are only able to give 30% to your work. Because your to-do list is full of urgent and not-so-urgent favors you have said yes to fulfilling.
Take a critical look at your to-do list, you will most likely find tasks tagged important and urgent that do nothing to improve your productivity. But rather they are holding you back from meeting your core responsibilities. Purge your to-do list of such tasks.
Pareto Principle Likes Automation
Automation can exponentially increase the amount of effort you are putting into a task. It increases the speed and quality of your work. This means that you don’t have to exert yourself physically or mentally to put in the quality effort.
Optimizing your work and business with automation isn’t always expensive or complex. You can automate meeting scheduling with Calendly and the collection of customer data with sign-up forms. You can automate postings to social media, and then move on to your next tasks and not worry about posting daily. If you can eliminate 10 percent of your workload by applying automation, you could increase your time to accomplish the other 80 percent by half. It would be worth the investment of time to have an automation consultant review your workload and suggest what technology you could apply.
Conclusion
Pareto’s idea that 20% effort is responsible for 80% of results is not an excuse to do less work. Not at all. If you put in level 1 work, 20% of the effort is what brings you 80% of the result, the other 20% results can be attributed to luck or other factors.
In the same vein, if you put in a level 10 effort, you get your results at that level, which is not great. Hopefully you will put a level 1 effort combined with an understanding of how to leverage that effort into greater productivity by applying the Pareto Principle!
Link to the contributions of another famous time management figure, Parkinson, by clicking here and reading our article “Parkinson’s Law and Time Management” .
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